R&D was the genesis that launched Northern Electric from the sleepy Canadian branch plant to a publicly traded company with a market cap of more than $300B, $30B in sales, and 100,000 employees worldwide. The lessons learned from my Nortel experience... “Innovate or Die“

By John F. Tyson

4 - Shaping a New World

"I was invited to present a paper at a conference in 1970 titled "Telecommunications and the Arts”, sponsored by Canadian Department of Communications, The Secretary of State, and York University. I shared the podium with Robert Scrivener, the President Of Bell Canada. Theoretical in nature, the paper was titled: ”Telephone and associated technology as a future instrument both for the production of works of art and as a distributor of works of art.“ To avoid burdening the text with the expressions “the system“ and “the model”; I simply called it “Alexander”. The paper went on to describe how Alexander would compress time, space, and accelerate access. The ideas presented were simply an extrapolation of social norms. The conference was held a year before the U.S. government issued a request for proposal (RPF) for what would later become the Internet."